worst of it – it did not sound awful to him. His abilities – to play loud or soft, fast or slow, staccato or legato – were all of the highest degree. But his taste – the judgement as to when each was appropriate – was lost. If he hit a wrong note, which he rarely did, then he could hear that, but if his performance lacked passion, then he was not to know. The best he could do was to imitate. He had once heard Anton Rubinstein, in Warsaw, play Liszt’s piano sonata in B minor and heard all in the audience proclaim it a performance of genius. Dmitry could reproduce it perfectly, in all its genius, except that he did not know what made it good. He could even vary the performance, but he had no idea whether each slight change he made was for better or for worse. It wouldn’t be long before someone invented a machine that could do as much. But it wasn’t such a curse. All but the most attuned human ear had as little skill in judging a great performance as he did. And he would never truly know how badly he played, since he could not judge. He was like a man who had been blind since birth; how could he know what he was missing? Except that Dmitry had not always been like this.
Today he chose to play something modern. He’d come across the piece in a music shop on his brief stay in Moscow, and had learned it there and then. It was by Brahms – his Rhapsody in B minor. This was the hardest test of all for him – to play what he had never heard played by human hands, but seen only on paper. That little semiquaver run in the first bar, echoed by the left hand in the fifth, was marked as a triplet, but mightn’t a great pianist choose to play it faster, as an acciaccatura, slipped in quickly before the following D natural? Dmitry could certainly play it fast; he had tried it both ways, but had no clue as to which was better.
He began, sticking strictly to what had been written and playing the notes as a triplet. The piece progressed and he began to enjoy himself, for reasons he could not fathom. It was a pretence – a pretence that he was what he had once been. He’d heard once of an Austrian prince who would stand in his box at the theatre and conduct the orchestra and at the end of the performance the audience would rise and applaud him. But all in the theatre – the prince included – knew he had done nothing. The real conductor stood in the pit, doing his job as usual. The musicians kept their eyes on him and took their time from his motions. The prince was following them, not the other way round. And yet he happily took the applause. Dmitry indulged himself in a similar delusion.
He turned and looked into one of the mirrors. He could see the candle now that it was not carried by a creature of confusing invisibility. The reflection of the piano was clear in the dim light. It stood, quite still. Naturally, there was no pianist sitting at the keyboard, but more than that, even the keys themselves did not move. It would have been pleasant to see – a visible reflection of Dmitry’s skills.
But that did not matter. It was only the music, the sound that mattered, and that filled the room. Dmitry closed his eyes and let it fill him too. If nothing else, it drove Zmyeevich from his mind.
Dmitry stayed for about two hours. He re-emerged from the same door by which he’d entered. Mihail had crept over to the theatre to take a further look around and by luck he was close to the main entrance when Dmitry appeared. He pressed himself into a doorway and listened to what was said.
‘That was very beautiful, sir,’ said one voice, not Dmitry’s.
‘Really?’ That was Dmitry. It was no casual response – more of a plea.
‘God, yes! You could get a job here, if you wanted, easily.’
‘Not here, I don’t think,’ replied Dmitry sadly. ‘Not in Russia.’
‘Follow in the steps of Rubinstein, then? Take America by storm. Make your fortune.’
Dmitry chuckled, but there was no pleasure in it. ‘Perhaps,’ he said.
He set off back the way he had come. Mihail knew his route well enough, at